Show HN: Infinite Swap – Trade a bottle cap up to a house https://ift.tt/P4VXCRb

Show HN: Infinite Swap – Trade a bottle cap up to a house Hey HN, Infinite Swap is a game inspired by Kyle MacDonald’s One Red Paperclip and other bigger-and-better swap stories - you start with a green bottle cap and trade it with other characters in various locations all the way up to a house and beyond. A while ago I got inspired by viral games Infinite Craft and What Beats Rock? and wanted to make my own ‘exploring a LLM’s latent space’ style challenge. After much experimentation this became a trading style game, where the LLM comes up with all the items, trading scenarios and value estimates, which ended up being surprisingly fun and somewhat of a roller coaster to play. I found it was the most intriguing if I separated the item offer from its valuation - so I implemented a pricing oracle called “Sal” who gives this info with his, sometimes snarky, opinion after each trade. The item offer mechanism goes deeper too - each character’s profile is combined with a set of hidden motivations. I then use embeddings and cosine similarity to represent the desire the character has for the player's item, and therefore what they are willing to offer in exchange. Links to play: iOS (small number of ads, polished): https://ift.tt/Ly4SW5N Android (small number of ads, polished): https://ift.tt/c9o3qa1... Web (no ads, a touch rougher than the mobile versions but still very functional): https://ift.tt/uz0w9KU Stack: GPT-4.1-mini for item generation, SDXL Lightning for item images, Kokoro for voices (the latter two running on my 4090 at home). Postgres + FastAPI on k3s for the backend, native Swift/Kotlin for mobile, React for web. Keen for any feedback, bug reports, improvement suggestions, etc. I’ll be around for a few hours if you have any questions. Daniel https://ift.tt/xcLpbYu May 16, 2026 at 05:18AM

Show HN: A Dark Cave – Minimalistic Graphics in the Age of AI Slop https://ift.tt/IWthQzL

Show HN: A Dark Cave – Minimalistic Graphics in the Age of AI Slop Almost a year ago I started building A Dark Cave, a dark text-based browser game. The game intentionally avoids visuals and embraces minimalism. I use only text, symbols, and sounds to create atmosphere and spark the player's imagination. From time to time, I think about adding graphics to my game, since it is one of the most common requests I get from players. I even made a post about what I call the AI Slop Temptation: https://ift.tt/oCWMgtZ... From the comments, it seems that players prefer no graphics at all over AI-generated graphics, at least when they can recognize them as AI-generated. In my opinion, the growing abundance of easily available polished graphics means games will soon need main differentiators beyond visuals alone. Maybe it will be storytelling, atmosphere, creating emotions, personalization, nostalgia, or the ability to leave space for the player's imagination. When it becomes easy for every game to look good, what will be the things that actually make games great? What do you think? Also, I am grateful for any feedback about my game! https://ift.tt/Yt0peLo May 15, 2026 at 10:57PM

Show HN: Swpui, a TUI for case-aware search and replace https://ift.tt/j3hKmN8

Show HN: Swpui, a TUI for case-aware search and replace Presentation article: https://ift.tt/2AeRPFX Codeberg mirror: https://ift.tt/cof3he9 I've been working on a TUI to suit my terminal IDE workflow after I noticed the most promising alternative stopped being maintained and had too many bugs. The tool is implemented in Rust using the Ratatui library and focuses on being ergonomic, fast and provide case-aware replacement. The main feature I wanted to have is immediate feedback for the search query, which is also why I didn't stick with tools like fastmod and repgrep. As much as I hate VS Code now, I really enjoyed the search/replace experience with it and that's what I tried to emulate in swpui. Looking forward to your feedback! https://ift.tt/0YTiM4Q May 15, 2026 at 10:47PM

Show HN: Mailenc – Test if your PGP email setup works https://ift.tt/gKzVXsa

Show HN: Mailenc – Test if your PGP email setup works https://mailenc.org/ May 14, 2026 at 11:56PM

Show HN: ChangeSpec – An open standard for notices in software changes https://ift.tt/jnRy7tB

Show HN: ChangeSpec – An open standard for notices in software changes https://changespec.org/ May 13, 2026 at 11:41PM

Show HN: Running the second public ODoH relay https://ift.tt/XYtsqQT

Show HN: Running the second public ODoH relay Every privacy-focused DNS service requires an account: NextDNS, Cloudflare for Families, Apple's iCloud Private Relay (paid, iOS-only). The protocol that doesn’t require one - ODoH - had basically one well-known public relay operator (Frank Denis on Fastly Compute, default in dnscrypt-proxy). I built a second one and the client to talk to it. https://ift.tt/yhuMgd1 May 14, 2026 at 12:44AM

Show HN: I asked AI to write Sci-Fi for eternity https://ift.tt/QVCAlnc

Show HN: I asked AI to write Sci-Fi for eternity https://ift.tt/w4XRZMz May 13, 2026 at 12:26AM