Vietnam has been hit hard by heavy rain lately, but the skies were clear this morning. I drove my daughter to school on a scooter, and since we were early we took a longer route across the river. From the bridge we saw a giant rubber duck they installed on the other side of the river, pretty cool ! Arrived at school she asked me to stay for the morning dance, so I watched her jumping to the sound of DJ Raphi’s ABC song with 50 other kindergartners. That was an energetic morning ! Just what I needed so I could resume work on this sprint ticket.
Last week I’ve released Gopilotty, my take on a CLI based agent that can be used with interactive (full screen) commands. Basically it can “write” into VIM, or any CLI like redis or sqlite, ruby REPL etc… I think it’s pretty cool honestly, haven’t seen that from the big names yet. I made a YouTube video for it : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfCqlAJxpQQ and that’s pretty much all the marketing I intend to do for it.
Moving on, I picked up “twitch streaming” as a hobby ! I made a twitch channel, Paostorm and my plan is to be streaming Chinese Chess games whenever times allow (spoiler alert, times only allow after 10pm and I’m not at my best at this time !)
I’ve been playing Huma, the “level 3” bot on Xiangqi.com. My impression is it plays all the best moves in the opening, then randomly commits some dramatic blunders in order to give the player a chance. It doesn’t feel very humanlike, I’d rather the bot consistently play the second or third best move — or, better, train the bot less or on lesser quality games and have it play what it believes is the best move, just like a human would. Anyway I’m still having a hard time beating it, I normally need to “undo” several moves per game due to stupid mistakes. But I’m starting to get a better feeling on whether my position is tenable or desperate.
I hope that streaming helps me to think better by voicing my thoughts, and forces me to make progress. I’ll try to keep a good mix of “theory vs practice”, though Chinese Chess is less theory heavy than western chess, as far as I know.