Dan Lew

Random side project: Balatro's least erratic Erratic decks.

blog.danlew.net/2025/11/03/b...

The unfortunate thing is that feedback is least needed in your stable, regular setup - and that'd be the only place where you get out the hardware solution.

I most often hear things fail when people are out and about (in a coffee shop, in a meeting room, using new headphones, etc.)

Hmm, is there a software solution for this kind of feedback? Or would that be too laggy/distracting.

Finally wrote up this short post that's been on my mind forever, regarding audio problems in video calls: blog.danlew.net/2025/10/16/f...

Book "John Doe Chinaman: A Forgotten History of Chinese Life Under American Racial Law" by Beth Lew-Williams.

Excited to start reading the latest book from my sister, @bethlewwilliams.bsky.social!

(Maybe if I'm lucky I can get the author to sign a copy...)

A 2D maze game where you guide a dinosaur across a landscape with many bridges. Each bridge has a diamond on it. Notably, two of the locations have an odd number of bridges connected to it, which makes the maze impossible unless you start/end on those specific nodes.

I didn't wake up thinking I'd be explaining the Seven Bridges of Königsberg & graph theory to my 2nd grader, but you need it to solve this maze game in his school's math app.

(You pick where you start, and every bridge disappears as you cross it, so it requires Euler's bridge analysis...)

Certificate stating that I am a verified human. "For proof of humanhood. They are made of flesh and blood. They smile, they grieve, they dance. They are NOT a Robot."

I'm undeniably human!

(Verified by this fantastic CAPTCHA game from @neal.fun: neal.fun/not-a-robot/)

When I was in philosophy, my professor would constantly use the phrase "you can't be a married bachelor".

But I just learned one of my kid's friend's last name is Bachelor. Someday he might be married. Take that, college professor!

I'm surprised Silksong is getting such glowing reviews; it was released with a fuckton of bugs.

One way to test whether a candidate is a serious prospect for your company is to schedule an interview right when Silksong releases tomorrow.

Movie poster for The Wiz

Move poster for Return to Oz

Just realized that I've been confusing The Wiz (the anthemic black musical) with Return to Oz (the nightmarish Disney movie).

I must've had at least one past conversation wherein I described how terrified I was of The Wiz as a kid (and they probably thought I was just wildly racist).

There are plenty of other bonkers cards I didn't happen to draw, check them out here: www.ccgtrader.net/games/sim-ci...

(My favorites: The Forbidden City, a "Ghost Removal Service", the leaning tower YMCA, and the Mayfair Games card that's just a picture of a brick wall.)

Sim City CCG card "Maxis", which unlike all the rest of the cards, is done via pixel art.

And finally, a little easter egg card - Maxis!

I think the game would've been 10x more charming if every card were pixel art instead of mediocre photos of buildings.

Six extra large Sim City CCG cards, including locatinos like "Regional High School", "District Courthouse", and "Sphynx" (which is literally the sphynx in Egypt).

A comparison of a normal sized card and an extra large card. The extra large card is maybe 30% taller than a normal card.

And now we come to the reason I was fascinated when hearing this game, the extra tall cards. Some of these make sense but my city could randomly have the Sphynx?!?

(XL cards are optional in a second deck; sadly you don't just shuffle them into your deck of normal-sized cards to draw later...)

Eleven Sim City CCG cards that are newspaper events of various local disasters, like "media uncovers bribe!" or "winter!"

Disasters are represented by newspaper articles. Sadly I didn't pull the "monster attacks!" card but as a midwesterner I find it hilarious that one of the local disasters is "winter!"

Sim City CCG card "Primitive Hut". It specifies that it's easy to rezone.

Sure, let's just mow down the primitive huts next to our city, no problems with that...

Sim City CCG card of "Ski Manufacturer."

Skiing was big enough in the 90s that "ski manufacturer" was an important part of a city's local industry.

Sim City CCG card "Local Monument." The photo is quite bad.

Apparently no one could find ANY better picture to represent a local monument than a badly-cropped backside of a horse statue.

Three Sim City CCG cards, "colonial home", "colonial gentry home", and "colonial servant's quarters."

Someone on the development team had a weird obsession with colonial-style homes... and colonial-style class hierarchy?

Nine Sim City CCG cards that are all council members.

Five Sim City CCG cards that are all people. Three of them are labeled "corrupt council member." One is a city council chairman, and the last is the mayor.

There's a lot of council members with extreme 90s style. I especially love the gigantic cell phone.

Some of council members are explicitly corrupt! And check out the style of the City Council Chairman - kind of looks like someone stole a company holiday party pic from their uncle.

Eleven Sim City CCG cards that just have a picture of a house & a street address on it.

Most of the cards are normal places, but there's a surprising number of "random street address" cards.

"Oh noooo, he just played 4269 Cornelia St!"

four unopened "Sim City: The Card Game" starter decks & six unopened booster packs.

A recent episode of @getplayedpod.bsky.social brought up an ancient, defunct Sim City-themed CCG from the 90s. I was fascinated by the fact that it had "tall cards" so I picked some up (for cheap) on eBay.

I thought I'd share some of the more bizarre/hilarious cards I got...

Remote US or Minnesota.

Beethoven once said that the Moonlight Sonata was like the Dark Souls of piano pieces.

For every day a programmer doesn't have a meeting, they gain 1X, up to a maximum of 10x. But if they attend a meeting, they lose all their Xs (and half of their gold).

I've been laid off! (Startup downsizing to a skeleton crew, sadly.)

I'm looking for my next dev role. Lots of experience in Android, most recently worked on Node/TS and Python.

Ideally landing at a mission-driven place (been focusing on sustainability recently, but any public benefit will do).

Everyone's obsessed about how many Xs (1x? 10X? .4X?) they can get out of an AI engineer, but by far the biggest impact devs can make to a timeline is by adjusting requirements to make a feature easier or even skipping facets altogether.

AFAIK, AI never says "what you're asking for is ridiculous."

It's extremely inconvenient that you only get good at something after you've done it for a while. I'd prefer to be good at it from the start.

A not insignificant number of past coworkers think I created the "gradlew" script and named it after myself.

(It's the "Gradle wrapper" script.)

Hahaha well, 4 wisdom teeth is not *that* strange. The 4 additional are kind of weird but I guess the dentists thought my teeth needed the space.