180 Lunches

Author: Samichez

  • AI Study Buddy

    AI will change the world! Or AI is a bubble that will ruin the global economy! Or AI is a new tool to be embraced in the evolution of humanity! Or AI will gut what is left of the individuals creative experience!

    Any or all of that could be true. It is a question that no one has the answer to. I am neither having a economic existential crisis, nor selling off my worldly possessions to prepare for the AI utopia. What I am doing is attempting to keep up with the advances and what are practical use cases.

    Hard Fork is a great resource for that, among many others. In a recent episode focused on AI in education, I was inspired to test out a new approach to studying with my middle schooler.

    The Approach

    I created a new project in ChatGPT^ and provided it with context for his classes and my aim to support him studying for quizzes and test. When he has an upcoming assessment, we start a new chat in the project, and load up any relevant materials E.g., study guides, worksheets, etc. Then we use the study mode introduced in July to prep. This is really the power of a RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) on display. I don’t need the AI to hallucinate facts about the Revolutionary War. Instead I am handing it source material and telling it to only operate in that specific space.

    What works

    We are leaping ahead into the material. He is empowered to more proactively review with mnemonics and chunking. We can jump into material we’ve forgotten or are unfamiliar with and help him right away. Prior to this approach, studying was painful for both parties. He would stare at a printed worksheet and I would have to basically micro study all of it first before I could ask him effective questions and assess his readiness.

    What doesn’t

    It is a lot of typing for a kid whose foundation on a keyboard is mostly WASD for gaming. The potential alternative is voice mode, but he sort of froze up when we tried out just talking to the to future bot. So the going is slow with typing, but that isn’t a bad thing. Probably more of a self fulfilling prophecy for him to get better at it.

    Conclusion

    We’ve seen an immediate lift since we started. Studying is less painful and his grades were already good, but also improved. This could be the slippery slope to what many people associate, AI + Education = Cheating, but being introduced to that concept feels inevitable. If we can be the “cool” parents and introduce it responsibly, hopefully he views it as a tool. Not a shortcut that undermines his development as he grows up with this technology.

    ^ I’ve been paying for ChatGPT Plus for a year now and using it regularly, but I don’t think anything I am describing here requires. Except voice mode, which he didn’t care for.

  • Only One Mode – SPEED

    I heard about Speed and Turnstile in the same conversation on the side of a soccer field with two Dads. I started listening to both with regularity, but as mentioned saw them both live back in September. Speed was great. Gallons of energy. But they were a bit hamstrung by the venue. Barriers to segment the crowd, a little too much sky and space. If they returned to Richmond in a smaller venue, I’d bet they’d tear the place apart. Plus they have a flute!

  • Best Games: Hollow Knight: Silksong

    Best Games of the 2020’s is back with the seventh entry this year, and another retro inspired beat ’em up is off the list.

    Hollow Knight: Silksong (2025) goes on at #15

    This game was touch and go. Not from on a “will it make the list” perspective, but from a “where on the list should it go?” Had I thrown my controller across the room and quit it in Act 1, we might be looking at a low-40’s entry.

    Thankfully that was not the case. The learning curve Team Cherry built into this game, may be some combination of intentional design mixed with it’s origins as DLC for the original game in 2017. When the expectation of the player is: “Oh you’ve been baking for a year? Please make my wedding cake” there is room for error. My short time with Hollow Knight taught me to pop a can of biscuits and that’s about it.

    Investing in that curve took patience, but Silksong ends up at a mighty #15 because that patience is ultimately rewarded. After 8-ish hours of being abused, wandering around in the woods, and fighting for every drop of progress. It all starts to click. Right around the midway point of Act 1. That could sound like Stockholm syndrome, but the art, world building, and crispy controls not only get you through that early stage, but really come into their own when you are out of it.

    I rolled credits on the game, aka end of Act 2, after 33 hours. There is an even more challenging Act 3 that seems like a pain to even start. So I am done for now, but may return one day in the future.

    Streets of Rage 4 (2020) gets round housed out of 50th place. It was a blast to play with my youngest and introduce him to an arcade genre I spent so many quarters on as a kid..

  • The New Chaos – Locked Shut

    We got to see Turnstile live with our youngest back in late September. Killer show. They were great, but so were Blood Orange and Speed. In the aftermath of new music and genres that the 13 year old wanted to explore we kept running into Locked Shut. Enough so that this 2024 album now rotates regularly through the speakers.

  • Odd Artworks

    The algorithm doesn’t always get it right, but on YouTube it does more often than not for me. Odd Artworks is it’s latest success story. Daily dungeon and goblin drawings are on offer. Quick form, dice rolls for prompts, sketches, and inks. All with some light narration on the approach. The current series is a daily micro dungeon and a new themed goblin every day for October.

  • Travel Logs are a thing now

    This month I’ve rolled out a new section on the project page to share and catalog the sites, sounds, and taste of the places we visit. Soccer has been a big driver of that. In the past three years we visited Greenville, Los Angeles, London, Manchester, San Diego, Sarasota, and in June this year Seattle. That trip gets the first travel log treatment here today.

    Visit the Seattle Travel Log

  • Sep 2025: Media Log

    The second monthly media log is a go. September started off slow with a trip to Spain and airplane movies.

  • ABCs: Alewife & Trouvaille

    Alewife

    This one was a white whale. First on our list alphabetically of course, but also the only letter “A” restaurant we ever considered. We’d heard great recommendations and it is most folk’s guess when we tell them about the ABC challenge. Well it straight up delivered on the hype. Vibe, food, drink. Check, check, and check.

    Trouvaille

    This is surprisingly one the only letter “T” restaurants with good reviews that we hadn’t been to in town. So off we went on a week night to this spot in the heart of the Fan. The food and drink were good, but nothing blew us away. The atmosphere was cold and minimal. Not a bad spot, but not one we’d pick again.

  • A case for reviews

    Building on thoughts about social media and modern internet interactions. I’ve been thinking lately about who leaves reviews. I’ll set aside the bot armies that might be thrusting a vacuum cleaner to the top of the Amazon algorithm. I’m talking about the people in your town that are leaving restaurant reviews. Who are these creatures and why do I put so much faith in them when picking out a new restaurant?

    Our annual travel for work, fun, and soccer has picked up in the past few years. In that time we’ve arrived at a new rule of thumb when looking for good food. Restaurants 4.5 and above. That may seem like a high bar, but we are batting 1000 when we deploy it. We end up having great experiences and even better food in every city we go to. Here too, a lot of the ABC challenge is driven off of recommendations from friends, but also online reviews.

    So that is how we are operating, but that has also lead us to leaving reviews. If we had a good time we’ll drop a 5 star via Google so others might take the wisdom of the crowd and have a good time too.

  • The Balatro Timeline

    Mike recently shared a link to an update on developer LocalThunk’s blog and I went digging around the rest of his site. His development timeline from 2021 to 2024 for Balatro is great. A peak into his journey from hobbyist game developer to threading the many needles necessary to make a hit game. Grab a cup of coffee and go read it too, but here are few moments that stood out for me:

    I have been making games for about 10 years now and I have been doing visual art projects for much longer, and a very important habit I have developed for creative hobby projects is to stop working on something when I no longer feel the drive. This is for 2 main reasons; first, it allows me to move on to the next idea without totally burning out on the last thing. Second, and more importantly in this case, it allows me to take time off guilt free and possibly come back to the project later on without wrapping it in negative emotions.

    None of my hobby’s lead to a passion day job, but I’ve struggled with the self-imposed stress of not progressing projects or getting burnt out and hating them countless times.

    • My partner was learning to code in R at the time, and she asked me “How do you name your variables?” I went on some rant about casing, using descriptive words, underscores, etc. She waits until I am finished and says “I like to call mine thunk”. I thought that was just about the funniest thing I had ever heard.
    • The way variables are declared in Lua is (sometimes) with the local keyword, thus local thunk was born! I wouldn’t choose this name for quite a while yet but this is the moment I looked back on when I was finally ready to create a developer handle online.

    That’s an excellent naming origin, considering “Samichez” is just me thinking that is a fun way to say and spell sandwiches.

    More ratings pour in, and by the time the day is done we are sitting above 90 on both Metacritic and OpenCritic. I wasn’t even thinking that this was a possibility, but it sure did build a ton of hype for launch day. I don’t think I would have rated Balatro higher than an 8 and I made the damn thing.

    Him giving one of the best game’s since 2020 an 8 is really telling about how close and self-critical we can get to our own work and comparison to what other humans are making.