RootGPT

I’ve really enjoyed playing the online version of the board game Root with friends over the past few months. Each faction has distinct abilities and constraints, making interactions asymmetrical. The learning curve is steep, but it’s worth it.

While learning the game, I used ChatGPT multiple times to ask about rules and strategy. Early on, it seemed helpful, but as I gained experience, its hallucinations became more apparent. The reasoning models outperform 4o but still have significant gaps.

So I tried creating a custom GPT. I uploaded the official Root rules and FAQ but realized I lacked a good way to train it on all the game’s cards. I attempted to upload images from this database, but the model hallucinated wildly, failing to distinguish between suits, crafting costs, and immediate vs. persistent effects. So I broke the problem down:

• I asked o1 to generate a structured list detailing each card’s requirements and effects. Since I could only upload four images at a time (the current limit), I had to oversee and correct the output extensively. Ideally, I would have uploaded a single PDF of all the cards, but reasoning models still don’t support PDFs.

• I hit OpenAI’s rate limit and tested Gemini Pro 2.0 Experimental (who names these things?) and even Deep Research. However, Gemini could only handle one image upload at a time, and Deep Research provided a report rather than the desired output—full of issues, no less. I also tried Claude 3.5 Sonnet but didn’t get far. And finally, out of curiosity, I tried DeepSeek R1. Its quality was, by far, the worst of the four. I’m genuinely shocked by the positive press it’s received lately given its actual utility. Surely it will improve, but it wasn’t even close.

• Eventually, I combined results from o1 and Gemini 2.0 Pro Experimental into a decent output. I then uploaded the processed list as a .txt file into the custom GPT.

• I repeated this process twice: once for the standard deck and once for the Exiles and Partisans deck.

The final product performs better than off-the-shelf ChatGPT 4o or o1, but it still hallucinates, even with explicit instructions:

IMPORTANT: Never make up rules or hallucinate. If you are unsure about an answer, tell the user instead of making something up.

Ideally, custom GPTs would support reasoning models, which could better handle the provided context.

Anyway, it was a fun side project, and I hope some people find it useful. You can check it out here.

Links: February 9, 2025

How to Weather the Storm

Am I telling you to bury your head in the sand? Far from it. I am telling you to moderate your exposure to the bullshit. Your retweet or reskeet or repost is not going to save democracy. Your hot take on some idiot’s confirmation hearing is, at most, freaking out your friends. And if you want to remain on social media, as I will be, do your best to separate the signal from the noise. Follow people who are engaged in your community, follow people who are engaged in helping others, follow people who are posting pictures of their new puppy because puppies are awesome, follow artists making cool weird shit, follow people who are creating new stages. Stages where you are welcome. Stages built on love and kindness and inclusion. Stages where the audience can take a turn getting up there as well and tell their story. And yes, follow some trusted news sources, and double check their shit with a second news source.

In a Tiny Japanese Town, Artisans Are Crafting Some of the Best Turntable Needles on Earth

Now, just months before 28 million visitors begin to descend on Osaka for the World Expo 2025, JICO is hoping to attract that newfound audience to the tiny, far-flung town of Hamasaka to experience a listening room where guests are encouraged to bring their own vinyl for a two-and-a-half-hour private session on one of the finest hi-fi systems in the country. The idea is that those visitors will not only listen to recorded music in its purest form, but also do their part to spare the city from the dangers of extinction that is facing so much of small-town Japan.

Weekly Dose of Optimism #130

NanoCas is a newly designed tiny CRISPR system, about one-third the size of standard CRISPR (Cas9), making it small enough to fit into a single AAV delivery vector. An AAV delivery vector is a harmless virus used to deliver genetic material into cells for gene therapy. The big breakthrough with NanoCas is that its ability to fit into a single AAV is that it allows gene editing to reach muscle and heart tissues, not just the liver.

What's going to happen to Ukraine now?

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 provided us with a moment of moral clarity. A powerful nation launched an unprovoked and brutal invasion of a weaker neighbor that didn’t threaten it at all. Instead of capitulating, the people of the invaded nation — with a little help from the free nations of the West — stood up and fought to defend their homes, their families, and their way of life. It was as simple a tale of right and wrong as you could find in Hollywood. And yet over the next two years, much of the American right wing managed to convince themselves otherwise. Cobbling together a counter-narrative from sources as diverse as Noam Chomsky and John Mearsheimer, they blamed Ukraine for provoking its own invasion — claiming that Russia was threatened by the specter of NATO expansion, arguing that a powerful country like Russia deserved to control its own “sphere of influence”, intimating that parts of Ukraine might as well be Russian, and accusing Ukraine and its leaders of leeching off of American goodwill. This inversion of common-sense morality — the idea that powerful nations deserve to be able to conquer weaker ones unopposed, and that regular people defending their homes and families are worthy of contempt — was an utterly shameful display, and largely failed to convince the American people. But it did convince a critical mass of Republicans, and now that Trump has won the election, it’s clear that the era of dependable American support for Ukraine is over.

And yet Finland was never absorbed into the Soviet Union. As time went on, its relationship with the West grew and deepened, and it drifted slowly away from the Soviet orbit. As of 2025 — 34 years after the Soviet Union fell — Finland is a rich, democratic, and fiercely independent nation. It’s also in NATO. In a very real way, the Winter War and the Continuation War were Finland’s war of independence from Russia. Finland may have lost the wars in a tactical sense, but in terms of the broader arc of history, it was an enduring victory. If the Ukraine war ended like Finland’s wars, with territorial losses and promises not to join NATO, but with independence and democracy preserved, it will represent a tactical loss but a great strategic victory for Ukraine. It will all but ensure that Ukraine, like Finland after 1944, remains an independent nation into the foreseeable future.

Minimum Levels of Stress

Imagine a fictional society that has unlimited wealth, unlimited health, and permanent peace. Would they be overflowing with joy? Probably not. I think their defining characteristic would be how trivial and absurd their grievances would be.

The Era of Scaling Without Growing

Small teams will gain superpowers once limited to just the world’s largest organizations — from how marketing is conducted and inventory is managed, to transcending the constraints of geography and language. As a result, small teams will increasingly be able to run — and compete with — big businesses. Notably, this trend will not only be powered by new AI tools that allow teams to stay small, but also by a shift in consumer preferences toward human-crafted brands and experiences (the magic that a business often compromises as it scales their team).

Earth to Lina Khan

What she fails to mention here is a complete and utter lack of understanding about the second order effects of her moves. Is blocking some M&A a good thing? Undoubtedly, when warranted. But by effectively blocking it all, the chilling effect had all kinds of unnatural effects on the market. And that ultimately hurt not just the VCs looking for exits, it hurt the startups doing the same. And it created a situation where fewer deals were getting done and as such, fewer companies were being started. This, incidentally, undoubtedly led to more people staying in their Big Tech jobs rather than striking out on their own to try to strike it big. The risk became too high with the only viable outcome an IPO — oh and by the way, that window was also shut due to some of this regulation!

‘Don’t Believe Him’

It is easy and quick, often instantaneous, to destroy things. It is hard and slow work to build new things, and often even harder and slower work to improve existing ones.

The Government’s Computing Experts Say They Are Terrified

“It’s like walking into a nuclear reactor and deciding to handle some plutonium.”

*Taps mic*

Is this thing on?

"What can we do?"

What can we do?
Well, I am tired...
I don't know how it will come about.
it will be bloody;
it will be hard.
I still believe that we can do with this country
something that has not been done before.
We are misled here because we think of numbers.

You don't need numbers; you need passion.

And this is proven by the history of the world.
The tragedy is that most of the people
who say they care about it do not care.
What they care about is their safety and their profits...

To look around the United States today
is enough to make prophets and angels weep.
This is not the land of the free;
it is only unwillingly and very sporadically
the home of the brave.

James Baldwin
I Am Not Your Negro

"All your questions about the pandemic, answered. Sort of."

The People (P): So there’s no plan.

Answer (A): Having no plan is the plan! Haven’t you been listening? Plans are for commies and the Danish. Here we do it fast and loose and dumb and wrong, and occasionally we have a man who manufactures pillows come to the White House to show the president encouraging texts. It all works! Eighteen months, 800,000 deaths, no plan, states bidding against states for medicine and equipment, you’re on your own, plans are lame.

P: I’m going to lie down. I don’t feel good.

A: Should we sing a patriotic song? I feel like our forebears would be so proud of us now. It’s just like how we all pulled together in World War II, every element of society, from the White House to Rosie the Riveter, with common purpose and shared sacrifice. This is just like that, except instead of coordination, we have competition, and instead of common cause, we have acrimony and chaos. Instead of fireside chats, F.D.R. and Churchill, we have tweets, Lysol and Ron DeSantis. Other than that, it’s exactly the same.

Dave Eggers
Flattening the Truth on Coronavirus

"Greet terror with the serenity of the enlightened."

For most of us, it is almost impossible to comprehend the ferocity and regularity with which life was upended during the first half of the 20th century. Plague and conflict emerged on an epic scale, again and again. Loss and restriction were routine; disaster was its own season...

When catastrophe is sequential, it eventually trains its survivors to greet terror with the serenity of the enlightened.

Ginia Bellafante
They Survived the Spanish Flu, the Depression and the Holocaust

"Coronavirus: The Hammer and the Dance"

Required reading:

For the countries where the coronavirus is already here, the options are clear.

On one side, countries can go the mitigation route: create a massive epidemic, overwhelm the healthcare system, drive the death of millions of people, and release new mutations of this virus in the wild.

On the other, countries can fight. They can lock down for a few weeks to buy us time, create an educated action plan, and control this virus until we have a vaccine.

Governments around the world today, including some such as the US, the UK, Switzerland or Netherlands have so far chosen the mitigation path.

That means they’re giving up without a fight. They see other countries having successfully fought this, but they say: “We can’t do that!”

What if Churchill had said the same thing? “Nazis are already everywhere in Europe. We can’t fight them. Let’s just give up.” This is what many governments around the world are doing today. They’re not giving you a chance to fight this. You have to demand it.

Tomas Pueyo
Coronavirus: The Hammer and the Dance

“Inside China’s All-Out War on the Coronavirus“

Riveting New York Times interview by Donald G. McNeil Jr. with Dr. Bruce Aylward of the WHO about his experience in China observing the COVID-19 response:

The best hospitals were designated just for Covid, severe and critical. All elective surgeries were postponed. Patients were moved. Other hospitals were designated just for routine care: women still have to give birth, people still suffer trauma and heart attacks. They built two new hospitals, and they rebuilt hospitals...

The real case fatality rate is probably what it is outside Hubei Province, somewhere between 1 and 2 percent...

So saying 80 percent of all cases are mild doesn’t mean what we thought.
“Mild” was a positive test, fever, cough — maybe even pneumonia, but not needing oxygen. “Severe” was breathing rate up and oxygen saturation down, so needing oxygen or a ventilator. “Critical” was respiratory failure or multi-organ failure...I’m Canadian. This is the Wayne Gretzky of viruses — people didn’t think it was big enough or fast enough to have the impact it does...

Journalists also say, “Well, they’re only acting out of fear of the government,” as if it’s some evil fire-breathing regime that eats babies. I talked to lots of people outside the system — in hotels, on trains, in the streets at night. They’re mobilized, like in a war, and it’s fear of the virus that was driving them. They really saw themselves as on the front lines of protecting the rest of China. And the world.

The U.S. is woefully under-prepared by comparison. This will go down as a damning systemic and moral failure of American leadership. I’d also wager that it serves as a canary in the coal mine vis-à-vis our global leadership relative to China. And this will not be the last mass epidemic.

An Attempt at Habituating Thoughtfulness

Have you ever found yourself in conversation with a friend for the first time in a few months unable to remember the specifics of the last life update they shared with you? “What was the name of the person they’re seeing?” “What was the dim sum place they told me I needed to try?” “Didn’t they say they were going to get a dog? Where is the dog? When can I hang out with the dog?” This has happened to me more often than I’d care to admit, so I’m trying out a new system: I’m creating a note in my note-taking app for each individual I want to track, and after I see them I’ll add a new section with the date and a few bullet points covering life updates and specific things I want to follow up about next time I see them. If there are time-sensitive things I want to follow up about, I’ll add a reminder in my to-do app too. It’s amazing the response you’ll get when you text someone asking how their interview went after they told you they’d be spending the next week anxiously prepping for it. Nothing groundbreaking here, but kind of wild how impactful following up on something someone shared in passing can be.

"Musicians Algorithmically Generate Every Possible Melody, Release Them to Public Domain"

🤯

Two programmer-musicians wrote every possible MIDI melody in existence to a hard drive, copyrighted the whole thing, and then released it all to the public in an attempt to stop musicians from getting sued.

Programmer, musician, and copyright attorney Damien Riehl, along with fellow musician/programmer Noah Rubin, sought to stop copyright lawsuits that they believe stifle the creative freedom of artists...

To determine the finite nature of melodies, Riehl and Rubin developed an algorithm that recorded every possible 8-note, 12-beat melody combo. This used the same basic tactic some hackers use to guess passwords: Churning through every possible combination of notes until none remained. Riehl says this algorithm works at a rate of 300,000 melodies per second.

Once a work is committed to a tangible format, it's considered copyrighted. And in MIDI format, notes are just numbers.

"Under copyright law, numbers are facts, and under copyright law, facts either have thin copyright, almost no copyright, or no copyright at all," Riehl explained in the talk. "So maybe if these numbers have existed since the beginning of time and we're just plucking them out, maybe melodies are just math, which is just facts, which is not copyrightable."

All of the melodies they've generated, as well as the code for the algorithm that generated them, are available as open-source materials on Github and the datasets are on Internet Archive.

Samantha Cole
Musicians Algorithmically Generate Every Possible Melody, Release Them to Public Domain

MMXIX

"Why time management is ruining our lives"

At the very bottom of our anxious urge to manage time better...it’s not hard to discern a familiar motive: the fear of death. As the philosopher Thomas Nagel has put it, on any meaningful timescale other than human life itself – that of the planet, say, or the cosmos – “we will all be dead any minute”. No wonder we are so drawn to the problem of how to make better use of our days: if we could solve it, we could avoid the feeling, in Seneca’s words, of finding life at an end just when we were getting ready to live. To die with the sense of nothing left undone: it’s nothing less than the promise of immortality by other means.

But the modern zeal for personal productivity, rooted in Taylor’s philosophy of efficiency, takes things several significant steps further. If only we could find the right techniques and apply enough self-discipline, it suggests, we could know that we were fitting everything important in, and could feel happy at last. It is up to us – indeed, it is our obligation – to maximise our productivity. This is a convenient ideology from the point of view of those who stand to profit from our working harder, and our increased capacity for consumer spending. But it also functions as a form of psychological avoidance. The more you can convince yourself that you need never make difficult choices – because there will be enough time for everything – the less you will feel obliged to ask yourself whether the life you are choosing is the right one.

Personal productivity presents itself as an antidote to busyness when it might better be understood as yet another form of busyness. And as such, it serves the same psychological role that busyness has always served: to keep us sufficiently distracted that we don’t have to ask ourselves potentially terrifying questions about how we are spending our days. “How we labour at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life because it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think,” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche, in what reads like a foreshadowing of our present circumstances. “Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.”

You can seek to impose order on your inbox all you like – but eventually you’ll need to confront the fact that the deluge of messages, and the urge you feel to get them all dealt with, aren’t really about technology. They’re manifestations of larger, more personal dilemmas. Which paths will you pursue, and which will you abandon? Which relationships will you prioritise, during your shockingly limited lifespan, and who will you resign yourself to disappointing? What matters?

Oliver Burkeman via Jenny Odell
Why time management is ruining our lives

"Hopeful Images From 2019"

2019 has been another year filled with news stories and photos that can often be difficult or disturbing to view. I’ve made it an annual tradition, after rounding up the “news photos of the year,” to compose an essay of uplifting images from the past 12 months—an effort to seek out and recognize some of the abundant joy and kindness present in the world around us. The following are images from the past year of personal victories, families and friends at play, expressions of love and compassion, volunteers at work, assistance being given to those in need, or simply small and pleasant moments.

“American and Mexican families play on seesaws installed through the barrier along the Mexican border with U.S. in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, on July 28, 2019.”
Luis Torres / AFP / Getty

Alan Taylor
Hopeful Images From 2019

"Our Weakest Spot"

And when you least expect it, nature has cunning ways of finding our weakest spot...

Right now, you may not want to feel anything, maybe you never wanted to feel anything...but feel something you obviously did...

We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster, that we go bankrupt by the age of 30. And have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to make yourself feel nothing so as not to feel anything. What a waste.

How you live your life is your business. Just remember, our hearts and our bodies are given to us only once, and before you know it, your heart’s worn out. And as for your body there comes a point when no one looks at it, much less wants to come near it. Right now, there’s sorrow, pain. Don’t kill it, and with it, the joy you’ve felt.

Mr. Perlman
Call Me By Your Name

"how to make people like you more"

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Chris (Simpsons artist) (@chrissimpsonsartist) on Nov 25, 2019 at 9:08am PST

"Hey, listen to your emotions"

I came across an anonymous post earlier this year titled “Hey, listen to your emotions” that shook me:

Bitterness shows you where you need to heal, where you’re still holding judgments on others and yourself.

Resentment shows you where you’re living in the past and not allowing the present to be as it is.

Discomfort shows you that you need to pay attention right now to what is happening, because you’re being given the opportunity to change, to do something different than you typically do it.

Anger shows you what you’re passionate about, where your boundaries are, and what you believe needs to change about the world.

Disappointment shows you that you tried for something, that you did not give in to apathy, that you still care.

Guilt shows you that you’re still living life in other people’s expectations of what you should do.

Shame shows you that you’re internalizing other people’s beliefs about who you should be (or who you are) and that you need to reconnect with yourself.

Anxiety shows you that you need to wake up, right now, and that you need to be present, that you’re stuck in the past and living in fear of the future.

Sadness shows you the depth of your feeling, the depth of your care for others and this world.

Inspired by this, I’ve started a morning routine of writing down a list of:

• Everything I’m feeling

• The emotion name(s) closest to capturing each feeling to train myself to recognize them

• What each might be trying to tell me

• How I can act on each in a way that moves me toward my goals and vision for myself

Acting on a feeling may literally mean taking action, but in many cases it just requires acknowledging it, processing it, and letting it go. Via The Untethered Soul:

In the yogic tradition, [an] unfinished energy pattern is called a Samskara. This is a Sanskrit word meaning “impression,” and in the yogic teachings it is considered one of the most important influences affecting your life. A Samskara is a blockage, an impression from the past. It’s an unfinished energy pattern that ends up running your life…If old energies come back up because they were unable to process them before, let go of them now. It’s that easy. Just open, relax your heart, forgive, laugh or do anything you want. Just don’t push it back down. Of course it hurts when it comes up. It was stored with pain; it’s going to release with pain. You have to decide if you want to continue to walk around with stored pain blocking your heart and limiting your life. The alternative is to be willing to let it go when it gets stimulated. It only hurts for a minute and then it’s over.

(middle path)

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when we disconnect
from our pain
we stop growing

when we are dominated
by our pain
we stop growing

freedom is observing our pain
letting it go
and moving forward

(middle path)

yung pueblo
inward

Lisboa

Masks

Purple Array

Banana Cream
Purple Array