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thepaperpilot avatar

thepaperpilot Admin

@[email protected]

I'm a software engineer who makes games as a hobby. I love making tools for creatives, and I love incremental games. I'm the creator of Profectus. He/him
paperpilot.dev

thepaperpilot Admin ,
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I think there's utility in it. spotify is a big company with a lot of locked in users, who have done a lot of horrible things. there's regularly calls for people to boycott and leave Spotify, and this may help people who want to do so but don't want to have to leave recommendation algorithms etc behind. this would let people setup funkwhale or navidrome servers that use musicbrainz' troi or something for recommendations, way more easily than before.

thepaperpilot Admin ,
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a platform where instead of instances that control your account and identify, you just create a key pair and use that as your identity/account is really interesting to me. I don't see why it would need to or should then involve Blockchain though. Relays like nostr users would be more than sufficient. then it's just a matter of costing a form of decentralized moderation - I like networks of trust, personally

thepaperpilot Admin ,
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you've made the classic blunder of thinking anarchism is merely anti-state, when it's actually anti-rulers. Capitalism is itself a hierarchy, state or not.

thepaperpilot Admin ,
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we are products of our environment. there is no human nature

How can we get more of the population into the Fediverse? Tech literacy?

I think this is really important right now that folks know there are better options to social media. Especially as we are heading into a world where a select few have control over the main ways of communication. Truthfully, we need tech literacy in all public schools so citizens learn how to be able to protect their privacy....

thepaperpilot Admin ,
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I think you're overselling the fediverse here mate.

when you just end up using an instance controlled by someone else, you do not own your data nor your identity nor do you get any assurances of privacy.

so instead the fediverse is just harder to get into (due to needing to do research into clients and instances and gaining the tech literacy you mention is nowhere near universal) for the benefit of... being able to switch clients? get a new account if your old one is banned or the instance shuts down? really the "main" benefit is it's harder to enshittify because people could go elsewhere and manually refriend people (assuming the new instance still federated with those people's servers).

I think the real solution we should be moving towards is something like nostr but without the web3 association weighing it down. something where the users don't need to understand the technology to still benefit from the actual privacy and ownership over their identity and data.

thepaperpilot Admin ,
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I'd been thinking about switching from YouTube music for years and recently made a similar migration to navidrome. I think it really is worth it. I initially had plans for integrating with musicbrainz to get recommendations still, but honestly I kinda think I don't need those. I have a massive library, and if it really isn't scratching the itch for me I can look up similar bands to the ones I like manually.

thepaperpilot Admin ,
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do you believe anyone who can not be individually self sufficient deserves to die?

do you believe anyone who contributes to society in a way that is not financially rewarded, such as by raising a child, deserves to die?

do you believe a society that can ensure everyone's needs are met and decides instead to let them die due to not meeting some arbitrary and unnecessary requirements is just or fair?

Would you use this app?: 'Subscription' to FOSS

I had this idea recently: if people are willing to pay a small fee monthly for streaming services or Photoshop, surely some would also be willing to pay a similar amount for the FOSS they use. Even a few cents monthly would add up to quite a substantial sum over a vast userbase*. In light of this, I've started working on an app...

thepaperpilot Admin ,
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yeah, proportioning my donations by time used is a relatively arbitrary method that punishes really good/life-saving apps you only need rarely. and, like, I have a server that uses traefik but I don't want it count as 24/7 usage and get paid more than apps I use every day but, y'know, not 24/7.

just splitting evenly feels a lot more reasonable. they've all contributed to making my life easier, and it wouldn't make sense to split hairs on who's had the larger impact. although that still means biasing towards libraries, which get used by many apps, over the individual apps themselves. perhaps that's reasonable, perhaps not.

in theory this app could allow for some very custom settings to determine how to distribute the donation, but I wonder how much is reasonable vs long tail of user intents.

thepaperpilot Admin ,
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with things like anubis, I think ddos protection is feasible without cf now

thepaperpilot Admin ,
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I just recently discovered SilverBullet and have been happily using that for journaling. Its self hosted and lets you add functionality by writing lua scripts.

thepaperpilot Admin ,
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I actually just made a bunch of utils for my own journaling in SB, including a button to always open the days journal page, which uses a template to get things like prompts and show widgets for things like how I felt that day.

I wonder, what aspects of journaling do you find missing from note taking apps?

joshsjunkdrawer , to Random
@joshsjunkdrawer@mastodon.social avatar

I'm angry, and today I couldn't hold back. Politicians have constantly disappointed us, so why bother with them?

In today's blog, I talk about how I've come to realize I might just be an anarchist.

https://joshgriffiths.site/i-think-im-an-anarchist-maybe/

thepaperpilot Admin ,
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@joshsjunkdrawer I liked your post! I agree with some of your concerns about copyright. I understand the argument for why it shouldn't exist in a stateless society, and how leaving it up to things like free association can ensure pro social behavior while allowing people to build off society's collective work, and even how copyright today still helps large corporations far more than small artists... but it still feels like its something we need for the time being.

Also, I'm guessing you were referring to db0, but there are definitely other anarchist communities online that don't support gen ai, or at least the non-consensual use of other people's work and the general destruction of the earth and further consolidation of wealth that gen AI has led to. After all, anarchism definitionally has no centralized definition, and there's many schools of thought on applying anarchism to various aspects of life.

Anyways, I also wanted to discourage you from just living in a cabin in the woods. Historically, stateless societies have still involved co-operation in spades, and I think the best thing to do right now is work on getting your local community less reliant on centralized institutions and generally combatting the neoliberal and individualism brainworms we all grow up with in today's society.

thepaperpilot Admin ,
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The page you linked looks pretty cool, but tbh this site isn't passing the vibes test to me. I went to the page on post capitalism activism and it was very sparse despite existing for many years. It just had a couple "action ideas" that were all little political stunts that frankly sounded incredibly dumb and ineffective. I think post capitalist activism should center around educating people on alternatives. And not just alternatives to gdp, that's still capitalist. The rest of the page was a couple headers and a blurb saying the action ideas were generated by chat gpt. I also hit the edit button but it showed a gen AI image...

And I get it, there's likely some utility to mentioning LLMs on specific pages, like the no code tools page (perhaps linking to Maggie Appleton's resources on barefoot developers). I just am fundamentally opposed to a wiki that is filled with LLM content instead of human content, and it's barren despite using LLMs!

thepaperpilot Admin ,
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Im not sure I know of a collection of resources, but the resources definitely exist. I'd likely just start with googling about the cause you care about, and find a community about that cause or just info about it.

thepaperpilot Admin ,
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Since we don't have many posts on here I don't want to add another about the jam (until it starts, at least), but here's your 2 week reminder!

If you're interested in participating, you can prepare by joining the jam on itch.io (it's not an obligation to submit!) and setting up Profectus using the getting started tutorial. And of course, if you get stuck anywhere along the way feel free to pop in to the Profectus discord server and we'll gladly help you out.

Looking forward to the jam!

Profectus 0.7 and Creation Jam 2025

Howdy! Happy New Year's Eve! I'd like to end this year by announcing a new update to my engine, Profectus! For those who don't know, this was an engine inspired by TMT but with a focus on empowering the developer to make more interesting and customized features. It includes a lot of cool systems that make developing Incremental...

thepaperpilot Admin , to Incremental Games
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I've released a new major update to my game engine, Profectus! I'm announcing a new game jam for profectus projects alongside it. Details here: thepaperpilot avatar thepaperpilot : Profectus 0.7 and Creation Jam 2025 in Incremental Games

thepaperpilot Admin ,
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It's not abandoned, and it's in my list of things to look into. Please be patient

An updated incremental games canon

Roughly 2 years ago I started work on the Guide to Incrementals, and most notably wrote a page on Defining the Genre. One part of it defines a incremental games canon - a selection of games that are definitively incremental games, and exhaustively illustrate the common elements of incremental games. When writing the list I tried...

thepaperpilot Admin ,
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thepaperpilot Admin ,
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I wouldn't just say a snarky response. Just rejecting the PR would be one thing, snapping at the contributor that non binary terms are "political" is a red flag. There's literally no harm in using inclusive language.

thepaperpilot Admin ,
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I've always considered this an interesting discussion, sop I've written out a very thorough answer here: https://www.thepaperpilot.org/garden/guide-to-incrementals/defining-the-genre/

thepaperpilot Admin ,
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Glad the website could get you started on a whole rabbit hole of interesting reads 🫡

thepaperpilot Admin , to Random
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While looking into the small web, I came across the Tildeverse, which is a collection of sites that provide homepages and other services for each of its members, with a focus on being a tight knit community. Like look at this one site, and in particular it's "what's everyone up to" section: https://ctrl-c.club/

I think that's really cool, and it's the kind of communities I think the Internet needs more of.

thepaperpilot Admin , to Random
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Got my music recap for this quarter. Surprised kiss me kill me was on there over mirrors.

thepaperpilot Admin ,
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I love incremental games with a story! Definitely picking this up

thepaperpilot Admin ,
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I don't hate apple. Especially from a privacy record, they actually have a far superior history than essentially every other hardware manufacturer out there.

I think they're overpriced and I don't agree with some of their design decisions, and in general feel like they could give the consumer more control over things, which is why I don't personally have an iPhone or iPad etc., I use them at work and have nothing against them in general)

thepaperpilot Admin ,
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This week has been a roller coaster, but I've been playing magic research 2, cat clicker on galaxy, and a couple smaller games as part of Galaxy's verification process.

Been also really working on my personal website and am really excited in the direction it's going! The overall theme isn't implemented yet, but I've been converting some of my personal notes into public pages. This week I documented my experiences with life is strange, so if you're interested in that you could read about it here.

thepaperpilot Admin ,
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There's so many interesting jams going on. If I didn't already have a million things on my plate I'd be so down to participate. Well, looking forward to seeing what others can create at least!

thepaperpilot Admin ,
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I've recently found out about https://search.marginalia.nu and want to start using it.

thepaperpilot Admin ,
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I picked up idle orbs 4 based on this recommendation but honestly couldn't really get into it.

Instead I've just been playing a bunch of Magic Research 2, which I'm having a blast with!

thepaperpilot Admin ,
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I'm not sure I understand your question about magic research 2

thepaperpilot Admin ,
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I agree with this take, and recently I actually read this article that criticizes how server centric fedi is as a whole. If it's hard and expensive for a layperson to self host, but you need to have an account associated with a specific server, then you're going to end up with a system where you're under the whims of a instance owner still. Not to mention the whole pick a server step severely hurts our adoption rates.

I like the idea of having an account just being a public and private key pair. Theoretically you could make one client side, use it to sign your messages, and servers could verify the signature and distribute your post without needing to have an explicit account for you. You could send every message to a random instance and it'd still work. You wouldn't have to worry about links to the "wrong instance" and you wouldn't have to attach your identity to a instance that might shut down or be bought by a bad person. The server would be essentially irrelevant.

thepaperpilot Admin ,
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Yeah, I disagree with that part as well. I think it's fine for servers to store the content and provide endpoints for specific queries/sorts, and expecting the clients to have all the posts is a tad extreme.

In this case, yes the data needs to live somewhere, but that's the nature of having data be retrievable.

thepaperpilot Admin ,
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Nostr does some interesting things! What I mentioned here is actually just the identity part of what I think could be a significantly improved version of the fediverse. I have ideas on how to support subreddit style communities and decentralized moderation and things like that that make the whole idea a bit different from nostr.

thepaperpilot Admin ,
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Glad to have you! Hope you enjoy the community:)

What games are you playing now?

thepaperpilot Admin ,
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I actually just picked up magic research 2, and I play through every USI update as soon as it comes out.

thepaperpilot Admin ,
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Ive been playing cat incremental as well. It requires a LOT of clicking at the start, but I enjoyed it enough to reach end of content. Although I think the last several prestige bonuses are pretty pointless - once you can quickly max out all the cats within each prestige, the remaining prestiges aren't very interesting. Since it's still under active development, that'll hopefully change though

How does one make content in an incremental game meaningful, and when should one stop making it?

A lot of incremental games I see are in perpetual development. They are never truly finished, the developer always promises that another content update is around the corner. And those content updates get released, and the games eventually get really big. They grow to have prestige layers approaching the double digits, or months...

thepaperpilot Admin ,
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I've discussed this topic and levied criticisms at common issues I see in this genre in an article called What is Content?. Essentially, I think it's better to have planned out the scope of the game in advance (as I've done for gamedev tree, advent incremental, and Kronos), so that the game feels like it has a proper end. It also sidesteps the issue of having new layers outright replace the earlier gameplay rather than extend it, as is common in games that keep asking themselves what to add next. Basically, planning makes better games.

thepaperpilot Admin ,
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What are your thoughts on the antimatter dimensions reality update? It's a game with months of content, but also added a bit of a narrative as you go through the celestials

kopi-pasted , to Incremental Games
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I feel like I've seen this before...
(Game: Unnamed Space Idle)

thepaperpilot Admin ,
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@kopi-pasted wdym? What does it remind you of?

thepaperpilot Admin ,
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While I never got into fair game, I really like that it exists and has such a strong community. Love seeing it succeed!

thepaperpilot Admin ,
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Mbin?