For a couple years now, maxwelljoslyn.com has been sorely in need of a facelift and some new functionality for user-friendliness. Over the last few weeks I've finally gotten around to that, and if you're reading this, you're on the new version of the site.
The rest of this post is a showcase comparing what the site looked like before and after mid-September 2026, for the sake of future visitors (including me).
A Better Homepage
The homepage is a better experience for new and returning readers alike. "Greatest Hits" comes first, is updated for 2026, and is slimmed down to make room for a photo gallery! After that, we segue cleanly into new posts.
On his blog, Alexis Smolensk takes down the argument that using AI ruins your writing, by detailing just how magically useful it is for assisting with your writing -- so long as you bother to use it intelligently.
Last night's first overnight Slartibartfast run was a success. I marked 4 issues as acceptable for it to work on, and it produced a draft pull request for each.
Tonight I whipped up a quick status monitor as an admin page on this website, so I can peek at what it's doing.
The costs shown below are not what I'm actually paying. To my knowledge, there's no straightforward way to understand how many tokens you have access to within each 5-hour Claude subscription window. Slartibartfast maintains statistics on how much work it can perform in 5 hours, then estimates both that window size and the cost per worker process, so I (and it) can eyeball how much work it can do in the remaining time. The actual stats are measured in tokens, but since those are large numbers, everything's converted to an approximate dollar cost for the end user.
I've spent the last few nights rolling myself a "software factory", a system for using an unattended coding agent to autonomously pick and work on issues from my GitHub repositories.
The system's name is Slartibartfast, after the hapless designer of fjords in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. For short, I call it "Bart".
The primary Bart process is a good old-fashioned program, not an AI. It runs on the same server that hosts my 3 live websites (Zingor; Unsphere; and this blog).
On startup, Bart builds a list of all open issues from my GitHub repositories which satisfy the following criteria:
If you spend time in IndieWeb discussion circles, such as chat.indieweb.org or the get-togethers listed on events.indieweb.org, or if you spend time wandering through the indieweb.org wiki, you will find evidence that many of us share the view that UX must come first.
There are one-click-setup IndieWeb entry points. The most prominent is micro.blog which gives you a personal blog/site with all the latest IndieWeb goodness and costs $5/month.
But most people interested in the IndieWeb these days are devs, i.e. nerds, and want to roll things themselves, which is why IndieWeb-related blog posts can feel like tech soup.
Ahhh, it's a good night to do some coding. I improved the performance of the market page in my D&D application, reducing overall page load time from 2 seconds to 0.8 seconds.
Players purchase items using a "Buy" form. The DM has additional controls in that form to "Give" a player character tradegoods directly. One of those <form> elements exists for each player-purchasable tradegood, and there are about 1,200 of those now. While profiling, I discovered that the 100ish <option> tags on each "Buy/Give" form (one for each potential buyer or recipient of the purchase) were bloating the page to a horrific 25 MB.
A coincidence involving a book club led me to make the acquaintance of David McEnulty, one of the two people working on Convoke, an RPG support application which has just entered (very early) beta testing. McEnulty said he'd read my master's thesis and wanted to get my opinion of his app. We had a pleasant video call that lasted almost three hours. I've already privately given him feedback on design, functionality, and marketing aspects of the tool. Below, I explain what it is and assess how applicable it seems to be for the average DM.
What Convoke Is
Convoke is an RPG support application designed to let the DM and players carry out certain parts of gameplay in between a typical group's regularly-scheduled game sessions. DM-facing functionality includes:
This is what all technical tutorials should look like. Well-composed and generally free of grammatical errors, spends just the right amount of time explaining each new topic as it is introduced, comes with full code samples, and includes visual samples of what the code does. Also, lengthy enough to treat the material in depth, while still being sufficiently self-contained that I can follow along -- without having read part 1 and without more than a few months of Common Lisp under my belt from a couple years back (tho I've done a decent amount of Clojure and Emacs Lisp.)
My job search of half a year has finally come to an end. I've accepted an offer from Epic Systems to be a Server Systems Engineer! Roughly speaking, half of the job is being a sysadmin; the other half of the time, I'll be a sort of engineering consultant for sysadmins and DBAs at hospitals that use Epic's health-record software.
I'm excited about the job itself, and also excited about moving to Madison, Wisconsin. I've never been there, but it seems to be a bit like Portland, Oregon, where I lived for seven years during and after undergrad at Reed.
Hi, MatthewDailey. Couldn't find your email so I'm contacting you here.
I don't recall how I found you and your projects -- probably HackerNews -- but I was intrigued by your GPT DND. You aren't the first to do "AI as Dungeon Master", but you are the first I've seen to add voice to the equation, so kudos.
I thought you might be interested in my gm-trainer project, which comes at things from the other direction: using LLMs as pseudo-players, rather than the GM, to provide GMs with a sort of training sandbox. Still early days, and not as configurable as I'd like it to be for other people. But to my knowledge I'm the first to flip things around like that. (Which makes sense if we consider that most people working in the nascent "AI + RPG" space seem to want to replace the "scarce resource" that is GMs/DMs).
It's been a long time since I've written here. In 2022, I was fairly busy with my master's studies and attending Recurse Center. Then, from fall of 2022 all the way through to the end of 2023, the lion's share of my time went to writing my master's thesis. Because I'm still dealing the hand injuries I sustained in 2019 and 2020, I often had to limit my time spent at the computer to just what I needed for working on my thesis. Writing for recreation was a no-go zone.
I will soon be interviewing at CZ, a large company which develops casual mobile games in several genres, including slots, match-three, and word puzzles. The team I'm interviewing with is focused on procedural content generation and analytics/data science infrastructure.
In pre-interview emails, the recruiter suggested I play some of CZ's games. I did so. Here are my thoughts and impressions.
For purposes of professional courtesy, I have changed the name of the company and all games discussed in this article. Unfortunately, preserving CZ’s anonymity also means I cannot show screenshots.
I originally had another section in this post discussing ad placement and characteristics, but I removed it once I understood that the "analytics" side of this team is focused more on content analysis than ad performance. Email me if you want it.
Four factors have combined to keep me from posting on this site for six months, which feels like an eon.
The janky setup behind this website Imposed too high an activation energy for creating new posts.
My poor hands, though in a somewhat better state than at the beginning of 2021, are still suffering from an undiagnosed source of pain.
I started graduate school.
I’m busy as heck outside of school.
However, aside from my hands, things are really looking up. For the benefit of my lovely readers, here’s what I’ve been up to since the final episode of The Drongo.
Welcome, each and every drongo, to The Drongo's first interview since our summer hiatus. We've got a real rock star for our guest today!
The Drongo: Our guest for this round of The Drongo is Jacob Hall. He's provided us the following third-person biography.
Jacob Hall: "You'd likely recognize Jacob Hall pretty quickly if you ran into him on the street: he's always barefoot, he's either wearing his pants or either of his two shorts, and his hair keeps changing colors.
He currently lives in Williamsburg, VA, studying geology at William & Mary, producing educational media for the on-campus Studio for Teaching and Learning Innovation, and co-managing a student-run house/venue/coffee shop called The Meridian. In his free time (read: procrastinatory sprees) he develops websites for himself and friends, cooks for anyone in earshot, and goes on very long walks."
I didn't expect to write you another letter so soon, but my mind kept piling up phrases which I could tell were destined only for you.
I have continued to spelunk your wiki. Your turns of phrase give me unceasing enjoyment; it would be clear from your diction alone - if it were not already clear from all of the philosophy that wrestle with - that you are deeply immersed in language. I must also note that I adore your term of art "Fireman Time." I often wake up to find I have unconsciously summoned a monster into attack mode. Yu-Gi-Ohhhhhh...
I have typing-induced RSI aggravated by a fall off a bicycle. I've struggled for months with available voice-input software. I've been forced to place nearly all of my personal projects on hold, and I'm uncertain how I will perform a normal job without further degrading my hands.
I will not stand for this. Computers can do anything. My mission in 2021 is to build the best possible no-hands interface for textual work at the computer.
I'm currently seeking funding which would allow my mission to become my job. Failing that, I will at least find mentors to guide me as I create this interface myself.
