I don't think sending your emails to somebody else for LLM inference, whomever that might be, is a viable business model. Unless it is completely local, I would never use it.
Did you consider JetBrains licensing model? I don't like renting software, I'd rather buy it upfront, but JetBrains with their fallback licenses really got me – you get your perpetual fallback license for a particular version of product. And guess what, I keep paying them anyway, because of confidence I can fallback, but they keep innovating with new updates.
Ah! I was so happy I can put postman to rest. What I didn't like is the landing page did not clearly communicate I am installing a non-free product with a trial, so I uninstalled it. I am only letting you know that this trick might affect retention.
Yes, however I do not see screeps as constrained environment – AFAIK you can allow yourself to write sloppy code and get your task done.
Here I focus instead on sheer performance of your code. You 64k of ram is all you get, every move you do blocks you and you get an equal chance to execute your program – e.g. everyone gets a slice of 10'000 T-states per game iteration. For context, on ZX spectum machine, you get 70'000 T-states between frames. So this, potentially, creates a competitive environment, where a bot that takes 500 T-states less to take decision to move and does so earlier, eats you, it wins.
I've been a witness of competitions when people would take "who can make this problem solved the cheapest" and it's fun. So I figured I should try and take it to extreme.
When you clone yourself you spend energy – and you must specify how much energy you sacrifice. With explosive cloning you will die fast. At least that's my assumption, this is all being refined as we speak.
Actually, I've been referenced to this already, but I have completely missed it.
I have been messing around with Z80 processor for some time and given how it's slow and simple I had to do some really dirtry tricks to make game code efficient, and that made me thinking "hey, this has potential as a benchmark, what if I make a competition where speed of decision making is key". Since Z80 Emulators allow for precise tick control, every bot gets equal chance.
And because of Z80 simplicity I was able to go 100% deterministic route: every game has a seed and it's guaranteed that games with the same seed and players end up the same, so players can debug what happened after they've lost, etc.
There are C compilers for it, but I am also curious if somebody with enough Rust-fu just provides a binding for it, since this is technically not about C, but about machine code.
I once tried to slap TLS/SSL stack onto ZX Spectrum – so HTTPS connection on it worked, but it took solid two minutes to just load a certificate – sometimes you gotta do the "I made a screaming robot - why? - hmmmmmm...."
