sumul

I enjoyed this and loved the minimal UI, good copywriting, and tasteful animations. My brain gets a little bit stuck on words that I can see but aren’t valid because of a missing connection, but I get that this is one of the main points of the puzzle. Anyway, great job!

This part really caught my attention (along with the rest of the preceding paragraph):

> Our inability to see opportunities and fulfillment in life as it is, leads to the inevitable conclusion that life is never enough, and we would always rather be doing something else.

I agree with the article completely, as it effectively names an uneasy feeling of hesitation I’ve had all along with how I use LLMs. I have found them tremendously valuable as sounding boards when I’m going in circles in my own well-worn cognitive (and sometimes even emotional) ruts. I have also found them valuable as research assistants, and I feel grateful that they arrived right around the time that search engines began to feel all but useless. I haven’t yet found them valuable in writing on my behalf, whether it’s prose or code.

During my formal education, I was very much a math and science person. I enjoyed those subjects. They came easily to me, which I also enjoyed. I did two years of liberal arts in undergrad, and they kicked my butt academically in a way that I didn’t realize was possible. I did not enjoy having to learn how to think and articulate those thoughts in seminars and essays. I did not enjoy the vulnerability of sharing myself that way, or of receiving feedback. If LLMs had existed, I’m certain I would have leaned hard on them to get some relief from the constant feeling of struggle and inadequacy. But then I wouldn’t have learned how to think or how to articulate myself, and my life and career would have been significantly less meaningful, interesting, and satisfying.

Thanks for sharing. I’m a musician and programmer, so I’m squarely in what I’d expect is your target audience. Since you’re posting an early version for feedback, here are some of my broadest initial thoughts.

From your README’s philosophy section: “You describe what you want to feel — ÆTHRA handles how it sounds.” But the rest of the documentation doesn’t yet feel aligned to that vision. The closest you get to that is when you describe your example chord progression as melancholic, but you as the composer already happened to know that this particular progression provides the feeling you have in mind.

I love the idea of a high level way to programmatically or idiomatically describe how music should feel, especially how the composition should evolve over time (perhaps even in surprising ways that are beyond current tools). I hope as you progress that you’re able to find innovative ways to build toward that vision.

The current feature set feels like it would be considerably more convenient in a GUI environment. Again, I hope that as you continue to build, it becomes more obvious why this is a language and not a visual synthesis/composition tool.

A little audio output demo would go a very long way in potentially getting me interested in playing around with this.

Good luck!

Keyboard navigation is fixed now. Tab to move around and Enter to clear.

I think this is a excellent question that I haven't been asked before. I don't have a great answer, as I don't consider myself to be particularly great at solving these puzzles. Some of my friends are consistently better (fewer tries, faster) than I am. I've noticed that I find important patterns and key moves more quickly now after playing so many of them, but sometimes I still get stumped. Often I realize that I make an assumption about a large group needing to be cleared at once, but the solution hinges on intentionally breaking up the large group to make something else happen a move or two later. I think it's really fun to learn these types of things by experience, so my main suggestion—if you find it fun and not too frustrating—is to approach each puzzle with an open mind and don't get too attached to any single moves that you believe to be correct. Finally, you've probably noticed that you're often left with the same one or two tiles when you run out of moves. Try to think ahead and see if there are ways to connect that tile to another one earlier. Good luck!

It's different every day, usually between 8 and 11 moves. It depends on the minimum number of moves required to clear the tiles in the given arrangement.

This is excellent, thanks for sharing. My solver is designed to find every possible solution so that I can evaluate the ratio of "best" solutions to all solutions. A lot of these optimizations are super interesting, but since I'm intentionally going for comprehensive brute force (rather than finding any winning solution as quickly as possible), they're mostly off the table, at least as long as puzzles are randomly generated and I need to filter them based on solution space characteristics like this.

I did realize while reading this that I could get a little more sophisticated by finding out the number of moves in a best solution using an aggressively optimized fast solver. If that number is within a range that's fun to play, say 8-11 moves, then go ahead and find all the rest of the solutions with the maximum brute force. If not, then just scrub the whole thing since I wouldn't use that puzzle anyway.

Very cool, thanks for sharing. And thanks for pointing out the keyboard thing. I was about to reply with "but you can!" but when I went to confirm I realized that while you can navigate to each tile with the keyboard you can't actually clear them. I'll fix that.

I endorse getting away from as much news as possible. I made that choice after the 2016 US elections, and it has been a big, sustained improvement in my quality of life. I've found that if something is important, I'll hear about it from friends, family, or co-workers. Hearing about important things from people I trust is way better than hearing about them from news outlets trying their hardest to keep me hooked. Sometimes I get the bewildered, mouth-agape reaction of "you haven't heard of this???" but it took a surprisingly short amount of time to feel no embarrassment about being out of the loop and simply responding with, "nope! please tell me all about it."

That's really helpful, thank you. I'll see what I can do to optimize the animation performance more, and I'll take a closer look at the animation timing at lower frame rates. Definitely don't want to mislead or confuse!